Sherlock laid down on the bed in the crisp yellow and pink
striped bed sheet. He lit a cigarette,
knowing it was against the rules, and stared to study the pattern of triangles
painted on the ceiling above. Emily didn’t
say anything while she bustled around the room collecting the necessary pieces
for an actual outfit. The state of his
room wasn’t good but there wasn’t a real need to tidy it. Until now. If he was actually going to keep someone around and let them into the
house, maybe it would be good to see the floor.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
“Sherlock? Sweetheart
are you okay?”
“I’m so sorry, Emily.”
The bed creaked from her climbing onto the bed with the squeaking
that Sherlock so hated. It was on him
for ruining the last mattress and having to replace it before she might have
noticed. The clashing metal sound was continuing
as Emily took the cigarette from his hand, pushing it into a well stained tray
on the bed side table. And then it was
the gentle arms that sat his stiff body up enough to lay across her lap.
“Sherlock, what could you be sorry for?”
The last cloud of smoke cleared the room through the tape
covered crack in the side window. A crack formed as a result of someone
taking a shot at Emily but not doing the proper research to find out her room.
“Can’t I just be sorry?”
“Nope. You need to have a reason in my
house. If we ever tried to stop something
without an explanation, it meant restriction of our powers and a sit in the
cooler.”
From the day time cop shows, Sherlock had learned that
"the cooler" was usually in reference to a jail cell. But as he
had learned from the times when Emily's brother Jack had stopped by, "the
cooler" had been a much more literal term for them. If a kid was
misbehaving, their hands would be bound in gloves that dampened their
powers. And if the scene happened to go further, they would be left in a
shed under lock and key until the lesson had been learned.
"Jack said that your prophecy was revealed one day when
you were sitting out there for beating some guy up."
The weight shifted behind him, bringing back the sound of
the springs clashing together.
"I was eight when that happened, and Jack was goddamn
proud of me. When I was out there, it was just so cold, and I was so mad,
that the shed caught on fire and walls blew apart."
"What did your parents do when they realized what you were? Jack
wouldn't tell me that part, he just looked away and asked how you were
doing."
"They couldn't bind my powers, so they just made me rebuild the shed while
the boards were still burning."
Sherlock managed to sit up enough to put an arm around her
shoulder, quietly saying, "Oh."
"But we didn't come up here to talk about my sad backstory. We came
up here to get you dressed and talk about being safe and then me showering
before dinner."
The bed creaked again as she got out of it, walking across
the hallway and opening a door Sherlock recognized as her old bedroom. That was the way that they referred to the bed
rooms in the house, no matter the current occupants. The footsteps moved from her old room to her
great-grandparents master bedroom, followed with the familiar sound of the wardrobe
slamming shut.
Emily’s footsteps came back quickly and from then doorway she
threw down three books. The titles were
covered in masking tape but judging from the awkward looks of the people on the
cover, and the small cartoon animals…
His thoughts were interrupted by the statement: "What
do I need to do, Sherlock? Do I need to find you a specific gay sex clinic
pamphlet and buy you a box of condoms? Do we need to get a banana model
out?"
Her voice had changed to aggressive from the tender
conversation they had just had on the bed. There was no sign of the laughter from before but rather than question
her change in pace, Sherlock just answered, "I know what condoms
are."
"Then you better be using them from this point forward."
“Believe it or not, I do know most of this and I was using condoms. Maybe you forgot because you never were on
the island, but there was a computer in your room.”
With the weight that came back to the bed also came a new
silence to hang over the room. For all
of the efforts made between them to make conversations more comfortable, there
were those points that even best friends couldn’t skip over. Emily felt bad for leaving the island in the
first place, the action that caused Sherlock to rebel against her instructions. And Sherlock felt guilty for getting caught
in his rebellion, then having to wait for Emily to rescue him.
Those were the facts that everyone knew.
Another question floated to the top of Sherlock’s mind and
he felt the need to ask, “How involved was John Mason with your brother?”
A sigh came from the person beside him, followed by one of
the awkward sex talk books shutting. For as heavy as the books were,
Sherlock doubted they could actually add any competent information.
"They were still engaged when I left but I heard
through Purse that they had broken up. I guess between me and Mom leaving
in the same year as Peggy coming out and Dad hitting the bottle too hard, Jack
just couldn't take the pressure. I'm surprised John even stepped anywhere
near my family ever again after the shit Jack did to him."
"I'm sorry you blame yourself."
"Even though I was trying to protect you, John is a better choice than
other people I've seen you go after in the past. He's a good man, from
what I remember. He might just be a little – corrupted."
Sherlock rolled the term ‘corrupted’ around in his head for
a few minutes, considering picking up a cigarette the entire time. He really should have been working better on quitting,
but it wasn’t like it happened that often. This wasn’t the 1890s where everyone was smoking things of different
blends and you couldn’t walk through a café without having a breathing fit.
He didn’t smoke that much. It was only when he was stressed and there
could be worse things to do to his body. And now that he had John, the worse things would no longer have a place
in his body.
However, stress was becoming a more common factor in his
life.
"Emily, you said I made a better choice this time but who
I have sex with is my business."
"As long as you're in my house, it's my business."
While she did have a point about the rules of the house,
Sherlock was still in the mindset of giving her a piece of his mind with, "Would
you prefer it if I have sex in a car down by the river?"
He was surprised by her answering, “Whatever you want, kid.It’s your body.”
Those were not her words.Emily would never let him go when it came to issues of self-care and
wellbeing. It might have been his body,
but Sherlock knew she had a personal mission to save his soul.
"It's just transportation anyways."
The classic line escaped his lips in a moment of wanting to
test her reactions. He wanted to know
what she really thought about self-destructive behaviors and awaited the response
that he had received a thousand times before.
As Emily asked, “How the fuck can you say it’s just
transportation?” Sherlock mouthed the words and remembered them in perfect order.
“Because it just is. Unless you haven’t noticed, I’m doing
perfectly alright surviving like this. Just taking a bit in and getting rid of
a lot.”
“That’s not how the human body works, Sherlock.You can’t live like that forever.”
“Who made the declaration that I’m human?”
The gentle embrace from before came back to around his
shoulders. Sherlock stayed in Emily’s
tight hold for a few minutes, recognizing her light sighing and started
wondering about the other two occupants of the house. They had been up here for at least forty-five
minutes. The check points in his brain
were starting to make all sorts of bad connections, realizing that his dark
secrets might have been spilled to “Joe”.
“So, Sherlock, what do you want for dinner?”
“Can we have macaroni and cheese?”
“Yes, darling.We can have that, again.”
Sherlock waited for Emily’s footsteps to finally make it
downstairs and the water running before finally putting on the clothes she had
set at the edge of the bed. It was a pair
of tweed trousers, a white casual dress shirt and a similar tied back vest.
His favorite outfit.
Points: 88
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